Somewhere in the pages of a self-help manual for aspiring murderers, there lies either the confession of a genuine serial killer or the most elaborate hoax Scotland Yard has ever encountered. That is the premise at the burning heart of How to Get Away with Murder by Rebecca Philipson, a debut novel that announces its author as one of the sharpest new voices in British crime fiction.
Detective Inspector Samantha Hansen returns to the Metropolitan Police after six months of sick leave following a devastating breakdown. The case awaiting her is an ugly one: a fourteen-year-old girl, Charlotte Mathers, strangled and posed beneath an oak tree in Holland Park. Among the victim’s belongings sits a peculiar book — a self-published guide to serial murder, penned by a man calling himself Denver Brady. Brady claims to be the most prolific active serial killer in the Western world. His proof? Nobody has ever caught him. Chapter by chilling chapter, Denver details his methodology and past victims with the breezy authority of a cooking show host explaining knife technique. When the book goes viral and connections begin to surface between Denver’s written confessions and real unsolved murders, Sam must unravel a web of truth, half-truth, and outright lies before the killer — or killers — strike again.
The Detective’s Fingerprint: Sam Hansen as Protagonist
What separates How to Get Away with Murder by Rebecca Philipson from the countless police procedurals crowding bookshop shelves is the extraordinary depth of its lead character. Sam Hansen is not your typical maverick detective. She is a woman held together by tea, mints, antidepressants, and sheer stubbornness. Philipson refuses to romanticise mental illness. Sam’s PTSD is rendered with uncomfortable specificity — the salt-taste that floods her mouth at crime scenes, the chest-tightening panic, the dark days spent curled in a duvet ignoring the letterbox. There is no glamour here, only grit.
Sam’s fractured relationship with her godfather and superior, DCI Harry Blakelaw, forms the emotional backbone of the novel. Harry is the man who pulled Sam into policing after her father’s death, who mentored her through grief and guided her career. Yet Philipson layers this relationship with a creeping ambiguity that makes the reader question every reassuring smile and every offhand remark. The gradual revelation of Harry’s true nature — his willingness to sacrifice an innocent man for a quick conviction, his earlier failure to protect Sam from workplace assault — is handled with devastating restraint rather than melodrama.
Equally compelling is Sam’s dynamic with her trainee, Adam Taylor, a pretty-boy detective whose initial impression as mere comic relief gives way to genuine emotional complexity. Taylor is loyal, capable, and quietly devoted. Philipson earns every beat of their slow-burning connection without ever reducing Sam to a love interest in her own story.
The Killer’s Manual: Denver Brady and the Book-Within-a-Book
The novel’s most innovative structural choice is its alternation between Sam’s investigation and chapters from Denver Brady’s actual manuscript. These sections, written in first person with a darkly comedic voice, read like a deranged TED Talk. Denver is charming, erudite, and chillingly pragmatic. He discusses victim selection with the detachment of a business consultant and sprinkles his advice with pop culture references — KitKats, Home Alone, Disney films — that make the horror land harder precisely because of the casualness.
This dual narrative creates a fascinating tension. As Sam reads Denver’s book within the story, so does the reader, and both are forced to play detective simultaneously. Which details are real? Which names have been changed? Is Denver a genuine predator, or a fantasist who has simply done his research? Philipson handles this ambiguity masterfully for most of the novel, layering red herrings and genuine clues with equal deftness.
The Evidence Locker: What Works Brilliantly
Several elements deserve particular commendation:
The procedural authenticity — Philipson clearly understands how investigations actually function. The bureaucratic frustrations, the endless database searches, the turf wars between detectives, the agonising wait for court orders and forensic results. This is not the glossy procedural of television but the grinding, unglamorous reality of police work under resource constraints.
The secondary characters — Jessica Patel, Charlotte’s analytically-minded young friend who demands updates in percentages, is a small masterpiece of characterisation. DI Tina Edris, the formidable Senior Investigating Officer whose competence Sam initially resents, becomes one of the novel’s quiet moral compasses. Even the pathologist Dr. Tweedy, who appears only briefly, leaves a memorable impression.
The thematic ambition — Beneath the whodunnit mechanics, Philipson is furious about violence against women and girls, about a criminal justice system that fails domestic abuse victims, about the celebrity culture surrounding serial killers. Sam’s parallel mission to protect Lindsay, the girlfriend of convicted murderer Richie Scott, provides a raw and unflinching counterweight to the main investigation. These themes never feel didactic because they emerge organically from character and plot.
The dark humour — Denver’s voice crackles with sardonic wit, and Sam’s internal monologue carries a bone-dry British sensibility that provides necessary relief from the darkness. The novel knows when to let the reader breathe.
The Cold Case: Where It Falls Short
For all its strengths, How to Get Away with Murder by Rebecca Philipson is not without its imperfections. At its full length, the novel occasionally feels overstuffed. The middle sections, particularly the extended subplot involving Andrei Albescu’s arrest and interrogation, could have been trimmed without sacrificing narrative momentum. There are stretches where the investigation stalls in a cycle of database searches, phone calls, and cups of tea that test the reader’s patience rather than building tension.
The book also asks readers to accept a fairly large number of coincidences and contrivances. Sam’s personal history — a mother who died in suspicious circumstances, a father who collected firearms and shot himself, a godfather who turns out to be corrupt — occasionally tips from complex into overcrowded. Each revelation is individually compelling, but collectively they risk making Sam feel less like a real person and more like a character engineered for maximum trauma.
Denver’s chapters, while brilliantly voiced, become somewhat repetitive in their structure. Each victim’s story follows a similar template, and by the later sections, the shock value has diminished. Additionally, some readers may find that the novel’s resolution, while clever and thematically satisfying, requires a significant suspension of disbelief regarding certain characters’ actions in the final act.
The Verdict: Closing Arguments
Despite these quibbles, How to Get Away with Murder by Rebecca Philipson is a genuinely impressive debut. Philipson, who grew up in a mining town in County Durham and was inspired to write after starting a true-crime blog during the pandemic, brings an authenticity to both the North East setting and the culture of policing that no amount of research alone could produce. Her background — a UEA Creative Writing MA graduate now reading for a PhD at Liverpool — shows in the structural sophistication and controlled prose. This is a debut novel, Philipson’s first published work, and the assurance with which she handles multiple timelines, unreliable narratives, and a large ensemble cast speaks to a writer who will only sharpen with subsequent books.
The novel sits comfortably alongside the best of contemporary British crime fiction. Val McDermid herself has praised it, and the comparison is apt — Philipson shares McDermid’s ability to balance procedural detail with genuine emotional investment, and her refusal to look away from the realities of violence against women.
How to Get Away with Murder by Rebecca Philipson is dark, clever, occasionally unwieldy, but always compelling. It is the kind of book that makes you miss your bus stop and stay up past midnight arguing with its choices. For a first novel, that is more than enough.
The Lineup: If You Loved This, Read These Next
If How to Get Away with Murder by Rebecca Philipson left you hungry for more, these titles explore similar terrain:
The Maid by Nita Prose — another unconventional protagonist entangled in murder, with a similarly warm heart beneath the crime
The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule — the real-life true crime classic about Ted Bundy that Sam herself references in the novel
Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra — a taut, claustrophobic thriller about a woman defending her home, echoing the novel’s themes of female survival
What You Did by Claire McGowan — a twisty psychological thriller with fractured timelines and unreliable perspectives
Silent Bones by Val McDermid — the latest from the queen of Scottish crime fiction, whose influence runs through Philipson’s DNA
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn — the novel Philipson herself credits as the book that made her want to become an author, and the gold standard for narrative misdirection